Blackwater Operatives Indicted for Slaughter of Iraqi Civilians

By Jeremy Scahill, TheNation.com. Posted December 9, 2008.

The Blackwater guards will be at the center of a precedent-setting battle over what legal experts call a "grey zone" in US law under which private forces operate in Iraq. The men are being charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. Passed in 2000, the law provides for prosecuting contractors working for or alongside the US military. Blackwater works for the State Department, and lawyers for the company's five accused operatives will certainly challenge the law's application to their clients. They also intend to use Blackwater's longstanding argument that the shootings were the result of an armed attack against the men. "We think it's pure and simple a case of self-defense," said Paul Cassell, a Utah attorney on the defense team. "Tragically, people did die."

By surrendering to authorities in Salt Lake City rather than in Washington, the accused men have fired their first defensive shot at federal prosecutors. They intend to fight for their trial to take place in a conservative, gun-friendly area of the country. "Though the case has already been assigned to U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in Washington, the guards surrendered in Utah," reports the Associated Press. There "they would presumably find a more conservative jury pool and one more likely to support the Iraq war."

The five accused are: Paul A. Slough, 29, of Keller, Texas; Nicholas A. Slatten, 24, of Sparta, Tennessee; Evan S. Liberty, 26, of Rochester, New Hampshire; Dustin L. Heard, 27, of Maryville, Tennessee; and Donald W. Ball, 26, of West Valley City, Utah.

While Nisour Square was by far the most high-profile fatal incident involving Blackwater and other private forces in Iraq, scores of other such incidents have gone unprosecuted. Among these is the alleged killing by a Blackwater operative of a bodyguard to Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi on Christmas Eve 2006, inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. The Iraqi government has labeled that incident a "murder."

Blackwater also is being sued in civil court in the United States by Iraq victims of the Nisour Square shootings. No date has yet been set for that trial.

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Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

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